Today a man who styles himself as a ‘compleat’ gentleman can come from all walks of life and all backgrounds. It is not about money, but about a set of values to live by as he turns his words into deeds through practical action. While elite, a compleat gentleman is not elitist. In his personal presentation he is always appropriate, a trend setter, not a trend follower. And, if he is your friend then he is very definitely all your needs answered.
He was expected to be immune to the temptation to cheat and finally, required to be proud of the code itself. The ‘good men’(citizens) in every polis (city state) were men of leisure, active in sports and outdoor pursuits, if only as part of their military training. They subscribed to a strict code of conduct which had been thrashed out over centuries. This ideal was similar to an aspect of Confucianism in far off Cathay (China). There a perfect man acted as a moral guide for the rest of society. He was required to be expansive, to honour the correct performance of court and religious rituals. He was not meant to be a small man in any way and this did not refer to his stature, but to his state of mind, which needed to be open and expansive throughout his whole life.
FEW things are more fascinating, and none more difficult, than to discover the hidden springs of national achievement. Among the achievements of the English-speaking peoples is the institutionalization of liberty. As an achievement which in modern times has saved them from such plagues as dictatorships and reigns of terror, it has been of particular interest to foreigners-especially, perhaps, to the French, whose own genius it has often been to explore the genius of other peoples. Montesquieu found liberty in England, Tocqueville democracy in America. Mrs. Letwin’s concern with the English gentleman is an enterprise of a not altogether dissimilar kind. It is, indeed, hardly concerned with institutional generalization at all, but it acquires sharpness of focus from exploring the character of the gentleman in terms of the imaginative world created by Anthony Trollope in the nineteenth century.
Meeting in the British Museum’s lobby, we are all given tour labels to wear (so far so normal) and introduced to our guides Nish Kumar and Tom Neenan: “two men who always go back for seconds at the cultural buffet.” The pair give something akin to a compere’s warm-up, by getting us involved in some funny multiple choice questions and instructing us to wave our hands and shout “museum!” if we get lost. The tour is only half an hour and restricted to a few rooms, so the likelihood of someone actually getting lost is small but the shouting and hand-waving certainly adds to the fun and earns our group some bemused looks from other visitors.
A mixture of fact and ridiculous fiction, the tour encompasses some of the important artefacts ‘acquired’ by the British Empire in the last two and a half centuries including the Rosetta Stone, the winged bulls of the Palace of Sargon and a Roman statue of Aphrodite. Along the way, The GOL read out some spurious ‘translations’ they’ve found; introduce us to an ancient game carved on a plinth (“the angry birds of its day”); and (my favourite) present a silly re-enactment of British traveller Charles Fellowes discovering the Nereid Monument, complete with dubious accents and grandiose acting.
The duo’s presentation style is amusingly hammy, with the kind of groan-worthy jokes and character play you might experience on a ‘quirky’ Dickens tour of London. At times, our guides abandon their learned guises altogether, melodramatically pointing out “a massive horse” or a water dehumidifier before moving swiftly on.
Often these reflections are triggered by listening to and telling stories. One couple tells another of a promising college classmate's slide into banality and cruelty; a maintenance man tells a college professor about his seedier extra-legal exploits; and on a plane, a journalist on the verge of starting an affair listens as a screenwriter chronicles his messy domestic life, unwittingly warning of what may lie in store for her too. The self-help preached by these covertly optimistic stories is not uncomplicated, helped by the more opaque messages of the nested anecdotes, but Ross's fondness for surprise endings and late-breaking, slightly slick revelation cheapen this otherwise subtle work. The plots confuse drama with noirishly dramatic turns; the epiphanies leave a cloying aftertaste. These are morality tales, expertly written and discreetly punched up with sex and death.
I love that Ahmad is completely honest and doesn’t shy away from writing about his doubts. We all have questions and if you are faced with a host of other messages without having full knowledge of what it is you are meant to believe in, your faith would be tested all the time. It wasn’t until Ahmad learned more that he felt a bit more secure in his own religion.
This isn’t a somber story of his tale of woe, mind you. Quite the opposite! The biggest reason why this book works is because of Imran Ahmad’s personality. He comes across as incredibly down to earth and moral while still being funny and lighthearted. The reader can tell that even at a young age, Ahmad has always wanted to do the right thing and could see through any hypocrisy that he witnessed. It all may be because he didn’t place first at the Bonnie Baby contest due to nepotism and to be a victim of that at such a young age helped shape that kind of guy he turned out to be.
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